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My aim in this brief paper is to focus on what a particularly gifted patient has taught me about getting in touch with one's dreams. Since my training, mainly influenced by the explorations of Klein, Bion, and Meltzer, I have taken as natural that dreams do not simply occur when we go to sleep, but are the heartbeat of our current mental life. Just as it is hard to seriously believe that the mind is only born after a baby leaves the womb, it is also difficult to believe that dreams are born only when you fall asleep, and stop when you wake up. This seems to me a rather mechanical conception of the mind's functioning.
While the emanation of our dream life is what animates us during the day, waking life also requires some relinquishment in order to adapt to external social circumstances. However, it seems that it is when we go to sleep that we may (or may not) “see our dreams” and let them progress without the need to adapt them to external circumstances by resigning part of their dramatic content.
By examining patients' dream material, I began to see that the ability to dream and the ability to “see” one's dreams do not necessarily evolve together. I then found a third parameter regarding dreaming — the seriousness (or lack of seriousness) with which we consider our dreams. Do they teach us something about ourselves and the meaning of our acts? Or do we just dismiss them as silly by-products of our minds, as flatuses are by-products of our digestive process?
Ms. A came to me from a nearby city in search of analytic help after two long analytic treatments, the last of which had been terminated some six